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The Piano Lesson August Wilson Character Traits

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Piano Lesson: Character Analysis

The Piano Lesson was written by August Wilson. The playbook is set in Pittsburgh in the late 1930’s. The play is about the Charles family and the legacy left by their slave ancestors. The main characters in the play are; Berniece, Boy Willie, Doaker, Lymon, Sutter, and the Ghost of the Yellow Dog. The trauma and drama left by the slaves haunts this family still to this day. The heirloom that has caused so much grief for the family is a piano. Their ancestor craved their faces into the piano for their slave master’s wife. The piano is the center of all this family’s emotional and physical stress. According to the family’s superstition keeping the piano with the slave owners relatives would keep them in bondage. With that the family has kept the piano from anybody else’s grasp, because of their weird feelings about it. …show more content…

Berniece blames her brother for the death of her husband. Which is one part of their on again off again relationship. Since Boy Willie is back from serving his time, he is ready to make some changes in the way his life. The first thing that he wants to sell the piano that their family has. Since he is back and has become aware of the passing of his ancestors slave master’s kin, he thinks it's a perfect time to sell the piano. With the money, he wants to purchase the Sutter’s land, where his ancestors worked as slaves, and create a better life for his family. Well Berniece on the other hand, is not trying to let go of the legacy and tradition of the piano. The conflict continues because Berneice is suspicious of her brother’s

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August Wilson’s play Fences was written in 1983. Fences is the sixth play in Wilson’s Pittsburgh cycle. Pittsburgh is important because it represents a better life for blacks; it provides them with jobs and helped them to escape the poverty and racism of the south after the civil war. It represents promises and promises that were broken. I feel like Fences represents the struggles Troy and his family faced because of their complexion and their constant disappointments as black people.

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The dynamic between a father and son is never a simple journey, but instead, comes with curveballs thrown left and right. In Fences, by August Wilson, he writes of the hardships between a father and son relationship and the difficulties a father has over trying to shield his son from life’s cruelties, to the salvation found between being fenced in and finally being placed outside of the fence—both literally and metaphorically. Through out the play, there are numerous confrontations between Troy and Cory—whether it be when Cory asks Troy whether or not he loves him or when Cory throws his football helmet towards the direction of Troy—which show the difficult and complicated relationship between father and son. Also prevalent in the play, was the lack of a father and male figure in Troy’s own life, during his most influential and important years. Troy recognizes that and the way he was/is treated by society in general and wanted to “help” his son by showing Cory the difficult lessons Troy learned during his youth, as a way to lessen the pain that would be inflicted on his son later on.

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The history of what the piano and her family makes it hard for her to have any contact with the piano. Berniece also mentions that she does not want to play it because she might wake the spirits of her ancestors that had passed. We can conclude that, that is the reason she says " Avery.. I done told you I don’t want to play that piano, now or no other time"(page 71). But that changed till one day the family experienced the presence of Sutter, and in order to remove it Berniece was brave enough to play the piano and call out her ancestors to help them remove the

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